In this melancholic assemblage of more than two dozen short stories, the author examines the austere conditions of human life in the American West and the backwoods of Pennsylvania; the formidable and unforgiving nature of the terrain serves as an analogue for the human soul. In the titular story, aging oil-rig hands Otie and J.L. discover that the company they work for has been suddenly sold, resulting in a massive windfall for its crass owner. Left without any apparent options, the pair chooses to die by suicide in a macabre pantomime of a lovers’ pact. The scene is powerfully captured by the author: “Otis and J.L. were flat on the floor, embracing, motionless, blue and cold. Tacked to a pecan tree was a white paper plate. On the plate was scrawled a note, a message that spoke of gratitude.” In one brief story, “The Reincarnation of Ned Piketon,” an unnamed fisherman yanks a decaying human hand from the water, adorned by one ring with the name Ned etched onto it. He knows only one Ned from his own life, a “human weed” who cooks meth, and unsentimentally decides to continue his fishing, using the hand as bait. This peculiar combination of the gruesomely saturnine and comic is a signature feature of this sad but absorbing collection. In the latter third of the book, many of the stories revolve around the character Will, a young boy in rural Pennsylvania; sometimes these tales strike falsely sentimental notes. For example, in “Through the Trees,” Will, alienated from his family, draws a picture of himself as an “expressionless boy” outside the house in a heavy-handed act of symbolism that apparently still needs additional commentary: “All alone, in the deep cold snow, up above his knees.” Fortunately, this cloying imagery is not characteristic of Burtch’s writing, which, more often than not, admirably avoids treacle.
